A Really Good Day(45)

My conclusion? Microdosing makes me both irritable and able to tolerate irritability.

Feeling blinding rage in response to chewing is not (or not merely) a characteristic of being a jerk. It’s a syndrome, though one not yet recognized by the DSM-5. Misophonia, or selective sound sensitivity syndrome, was first identified by two married neuroscientists, Margaret and Pawel Jastreboff. They proved that something happens in the central nervous system of those of us with misophonia when we hear certain types of sounds, especially ones like slurping, sniffing, throat clearing, gum chewing, whistling, and food chewing. We sweat; our muscles tense. We even experience unwanted sexual arousal.

The last effect is particularly bizarre. I remember once sitting in my law school final exams, being driven mad by a fellow student with a head cold. Even on a good day, I loathed this guy. He was a classic Harvard mansplainer who smirked and rolled his eyes whenever women spoke in class, even the women professors he was paying good money to smirk at. This particular morning, his thin lips were twisted into their usual sneer, but his pinched nose was red and dripping. Every few minutes, he would suck up his mucus with a cacophonous, wet snort. Each time, a wave of rage would course through my body. I felt it in my face, my gut, my arms, my legs. And then, to my horror, the feeling settled into my groin. I was overwhelmed by the urge to flip the hateful jerk over and fuck his disgusting brains out. The feeling was, to say the least, disconcerting.

When I was young, my misophonia was primarily triggered by my father, though, fortunately, without the gruesome erotic component. I would sit at the dinner table, my fingers in my ears, trying to muffle the sounds of his chewing. That he tolerated this for an instant, let alone the entire period of my adolescence, gives lie to my claims of his occasional fits of bad temper. Or perhaps his bad moods simply didn’t correspond with mealtimes. At any rate, the man deserves a medal, or at least a shout-out, for forbearance.

This morning, after I found myself bickering with my husband about something pointless, I handed him a handful of almonds and walked out of the kitchen and into the living room. I heard a crunch, the smack of lips; I felt a wave of anger. Rather than do what I might once have done—hang around waiting for an excuse to pick a fight—I packed up my laptop and headed out for a café, where I could safely be enraged by the sounds of strangers chewing.





Day 20


Transition Day

Physical Sensations: None.

Mood: Fabulous. Truly delightful.

Conflict: None.

Sleep: Adequate.

Work: Chugging along happily.

Pain: Virtually none.





Today I’ve been reading accounts of “bad trips.” The description of these awful, painful, grotesque, and yet life-altering trips can be terrifying. In a typical narrative, reproduced in Albert Hofmann’s LSD, My Problem Child, Jürg Kreienbühl, a Swiss painter, writes, “?‘Hellish’ went through my mind, and all of a sudden horror passed through my limbs.” Over the next fearful hours, his beautiful young mistress’s yellow-and-black shoes turned into malevolent wasps crawling over the floor. Water seemed slimy, viscous, and poisonous. He felt a pervasive sense of dread and fear. Finally, as the effects of the drug wore off, he realized that what he had been experiencing was his personality, boiled down to its essence. And that essence was selfishness. He saw himself clearly, a cynical and cold man motivated by greed and self-interest. “I loved only myself,” he told Hofmann. Afterward, Kreienbühl left his mistress and returned to his wife and children, a changed man.

My fear of a “bad trip” has always prevented me from trying a typical dose of LSD. The prospect of being locked in my own, ugly mind terrifies me. What I’ve learned about the concept of set and setting inclines me to think that I wasn’t wrong to avoid the drug in the past. The settings in which I was offered LSD were not awful, but they weren’t ideal, either. Though I liked college well enough, I was never so happy that a dorm room full of other tripping students would seem like a sufficiently supportive environment. Furthermore, set is the ultimate of self-fulfilling prophecies. A mental state of fear and dread can only lead to an acid trip of fear and dread.

The day I ate those few mushrooms and swung for hours on a tire swing was pleasant enough, but not so delightful that I wanted to repeat it, or try anything stronger. And then, about five years ago, I had an experience that was so terrifying I’m surprised I’m even doing this experiment at all. Though I hadn’t taken a psychedelic, I definitely had what can be described as a bad trip.

It happened while my husband was out of town, at a writers’ retreat deep in the New Hampshire woods. This was a few weeks after I had weaned myself off of Ambien, using prescribed medical marijuana to fall asleep instead. I don’t like to smoke, so I bought cannabis capsules from the dispensary. With the help of the marijuana, I’d drop off to sleep readily enough, though not with the effortless bliss of Ambien. That night, however, when I swallowed the capsule, the walls began to breathe.

I lay in bed watching the walls, my own breathing growing shallow. I broke out in a clammy sweat. A drink of water, I thought, might calm me. I sat up in bed and stretched one foot out to the floor. Stepping on the floor in my bedroom was like stepping onto a sponge. My toes sank into the wood planks with an audible squelch.

That’s when I called my husband. He answered the phone, but the line crackled, and I missed every other word. He had almost no reception, he said. His screen showed a single indicator bar of signal.